David Bowie Dies After Battle With Cancer

After a courtship of more than six months, Dublin-based pharmaceutical Shire agreed to buy Baxalta for $32 billion, a deal the companies said would create the world’s largest maker of rare-disease drugs. The pair signed off on the deal after overcoming fears the tie-up could run afoul of U.S. tax laws. The deal underlines the allure of rare-disease drugs, which don’t face the same pricing pressures as treatments.

The tie-up is expected to generate annual savings of more than $500 million within the first three years.

Abuse of opioids like heroin and prescription painkillers is straining child-welfare agencies across the U.S. and sending more children into foster care, officials say. Addiction treatment for opioids only occasionally succeeds, relapse is common and children often languish for years in the system. The number of children in foster care nationwide as of September 2014 was up 3.5% from a year earlier to 415,129, according to the latest U.S. data. The data don’t specifically measure how many children land in foster care as a result of their parents’ drug use, but some state and local officials say opioid addiction is likely contributing to the increase.

The epidemic is fueled by overprescribing pain pills, coupled with cheap and abundant heroin.

AT&T is bringing back unlimited wireless data plans, a reversal after more than five years of moving customers away from such plans onto those that charge for data use. The new plans are available only to customers who subscribe to AT&T’s recently acquired satellite television service, DirecTV, or its older U-verse TV service. They come at a competitive time that has carriers looking for new ways to attract customers, and retain existing ones, without simply cutting prices.

$100
The new AT&T plan includes unlimited data, talk and text for this amount per month.

Cold and flu suffererers reaching for Echinacea, an herbal remedy made from a plant, to prevent respiratory infections may have the right idea. A study in 2015 found a hot drink containing echinacea to be as good as Tamiflu for treating the flu, and a 2012 study found the remedy cut down on the number of days suffered with colds. The results don’t apply to all formulations of echinacea, which can vary widely, and scientists caution that people at high risk for flu complications shouldn’t forgo prescriptions.